


Escape

by Aaron_The_8th_Demon



Series: God Damn Apocalypse [4]
Category: Van Helsing (TV 2016)
Genre: Self-Reflection, Vampirism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-16
Updated: 2018-09-16
Packaged: 2019-07-12 21:35:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16003766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aaron_The_8th_Demon/pseuds/Aaron_The_8th_Demon
Summary: Axel wonders how long he can last before he forgets what it’s like to be human.





	Escape

**Author's Note:**

> I had to write this, because... how the fuck did Axel escape The Farm? Well, here's a possible answer to that.

 

This quarantine zone is so obviously not a fucking quarantine zone, now that he’s getting a good look at everything.

The dead soldiers are still in a pile, while Gorman and the feral have been left where he killed them. It doesn’t matter if he’s surrounded by decaying bodies and radiation, because his current state of existence is immune to those things. Right now, Axel is interested in a specimen fridge that’s full of blood packs.

The fridge is in good condition, and the blood won’t expire for a couple of weeks. That means he has a couple of weeks to figure out a way to escape before he begins to starve. So he wanders throughout his underground prison, looking at everything, even knowing that the idea of finding a way out is laughable. As if he cares about anything anymore that could be laughed at.

During his futile searching, Axel considers: if he’s really lucky and does find a way out, what will he do then? He knows his group is long gone, so he’ll be alone. But of course ferals and feeders will no longer try to go after him, which is definitely points in favor of his survival. Axel doesn’t expect to make it out of this tomb, but just in case he does, he knows he’ll need a plan.

What will be his goal?

Well… Axel-the-marine knows what his goal is supposed to be. He’ll have to find Vanessa, because she can fix him. Axel-the-vampire isn’t interested in being _fixed._ But he’s a marine. His last orders were to protect Vanessa, and he hasn’t been relieved of those orders yet - even though Vanessa is clearly no longer in need of protecting. So now he knows what his objective is. He’ll find the way out, meet up with Vanessa, get turned back into a human, and reassess the situation afterwards to see what his next objective will be.

How will he find her?

Hmm… that one needs a bit more thought. They didn’t really have a way to get gas for Wanda, so Axel knows they’ll be moving on foot. A person can only travel so many miles a day, and most of them will still be weak from the radioactivity, so they won’t be progressing very quickly. If nothing else, he may be able to follow a trail of dead bloodsuckers, because the fucking things are everywhere and Vanessa won’t run from them.

What about humans he might run into?

Axel’s hearing and smell have been jacked up by the transformation, so he knows that even if he can’t see any people, it won’t be hard to detect them at all. Ergo, they’ll be easy to avoid. Axel-the-marine approves of this idea. Axel-the-vampire would rather fucking eat them.

Which begs the question… how will he keep from starving to death?

Axel stops moving along the wall briefly to try and work that one out. He has blood packs… but not very many, definitely not enough for a long hike. He won’t be able to keep them fresh, either, because it’s not quite cold enough for that, and besides they’re going to expire in a couple of weeks even if he could.

And he notices it - an HVAC grille. Further proof (as if he needed any) that this isn’t a real fucking quarantine, because a military bunker designed to contain a major illness would have an air supply independent of the rest of the facility. It’s hanging by one screw, which also explains how that feral made it into the sealed area. It was probably lured by the smell of the blood that had been smeared across the walls.

Axel makes a mental note of the location and then goes back to his fridge. There must be something around here that can help… specimen containers. They’re not insulated, though. He rummages some more and finds a thermometer, which he impulsively sticks in his mouth. When it beeps, it reads room temperature, so that’s more points in favor of his survival. He can still detect hot and cold with his skin, but extreme temperature doesn’t bother him like it would if he was still human, so that means…

Axel stuffs the pouches of his LBE with cold packs, two per blood bag. He’s careful about crawling through the HVAC duct, crossing to the other side of the wall and dropping down to the floor. He’ll be free soon, and even though he knows it’s been less than a week, if he could still be happy about things he’d be happy now.

Once in the open air, Axel notes the dead ferals in the area and heads in that direction. A sniff of the air tells him he’s alone, so he pulls out a blood pack and absently sucks on it while he walks. The scent trail is faint, but even without the bodies here and there he would’ve been able to tell where they’d passed through.

Vanessa smells a little different from the others, and he can’t help questioning why that is. It’s probably something to do with her abilities, but the exact reason is a mystery. Axel-the-marine tries to decode this while Axel-the-vampire is only interested in the fact that it means she’s inedible to him.

She’s going to save him. He knows that he must look like a fucking nightmare, but it doesn’t mean he has to give in to the impulses and bloodlust. Of course, logically he also realizes that it’s easy for him to say that because right now he’s fed and on the move. Once he runs out of blood bags he doesn’t know what will happen.

And Axel walks. He can’t get tired, he doesn’t need sleep, and if he really focuses he can go a full day without feeding. The biggest issue is that the sun does still come out, which means he has to find shade or a hiding place, and that slows him down more than is acceptable. He has to find Vanessa, but if he keeps stopping, he’ll never catch up.

It’s actually quite awhile before he encounters or even detects a living human.

Axel hasn’t been counting, but he estimates it’s been five days since he escaped the bunker. He has one meal left and it’ll probably go rancid soon, since the chemical cold packs couldn’t stay frozen this long. He’s now stuck packing it in snow, which isn’t as cold, but since his body is the temperature of the environment now, it doesn’t melt too quickly.

The air isn’t moving, so his sense of smell is a little stunted, but it’s still head and shoulders over a human’s. Which is why he notices - warm air. Breath, in fact, from a person. Axel inhales deeper and tracks them so that he can stay out of reach. He’s hungry, but it’s not bad enough for him to lose control and attack someone yet.

Then his hearing picks up what scent couldn’t tell him - the breaths are a little closer than he thought, very rapid… sniffling. He can also faintly detect rushed crunching footsteps: ferals. He wasn’t the only one to notice. Well, fuck it. Axel-the-vampire would like to eat this human, but Axel-the-marine has already figured out that whoever it is needs his help. Who knows, maybe they can even point him toward Vanessa.

He makes his way over to the point of contact, stopping just far enough away that they don’t know he’s here yet. The ferals are nearby, and the human finally knew it too (they weren’t being quiet). Three bloodsuckers - Axel can take them. He pulls out his combat knife and the ferals aren’t expecting to be attacked by another vampire, which works ridiculously well to his advantage. By the time the third one realizes it should fight back, the first two are already dead.

He tears their heads off their necks to make sure they won’t get up again before looking over at the human.

It’s the little girl who ran away from the hospital.

She’s just watching, so scared she can’t even twitch. At least until Axel starts moving toward her, because then she’s running from him. He pounces but doesn’t flatten her, just holding her against himself as she tries to get free. He tries to explain that he’s the marine from Seattle Valley General, that he’s trying to help, but that just terrifies her more. His voice is a rumbling snarl and he knows that he’s far from pretty. Children have every reason to run screaming from him, now.

The truth is, Axel-the-marine would never hurt a child, despite Axel-the-vampire’s longing for blood. Adults, sure, he’s killed plenty of them. But never kids. Even as a blood-drinking monster, he will never go after children. It takes him a minute to remember her name - Callie. When he calls her by it, she stops thrashing. He tells her his name, because he doesn’t know if she already knew it or not, and slowly lets go of her. Axel pulls the blood bag out of his LBE and tells her that’s how he eats, he doesn’t go after people.

And then Callie tells him she might be able to get more for him.

They start walking, or more accurately Axel’s walking with Callie riding on his back because it’s faster and safer. She says there were a couple adults talking about some place with a surgeon in it, but they got killed and she ran. So now she has Axel - he’ll get her to safety and she’ll get him blood packs from the surgeon.

He asks if she’s seen Vanessa come this way, because the snow is coming down and he’s lost the faint trail he started with. Callie asks if they left him somewhere because he got bit. No, he got bit because he got left somewhere, but it wasn’t Vanessa’s fault. She seems happy about that. She liked Vanessa while she was there. She hopes he finds her again.

They stumble across some dead humans in a trashed camp. Axel steals a hooded trench coat from one body because it’ll protect him from the sun and scrounges up a can of tuna for Callie. Axel-the-vampire is pissy about trying to stretch his remaining food by only drinking half the blood pack, but Axel-the-marine knows the girl needs to stop for a little while and rest. He’s not warm, but he’s warmer than nothing, so he wraps her up against his chest with his arms because at least then the wind won’t make things worse.

It would’ve been distressing as a human, knowing that he can’t find Vanessa’s trail and pausing for even this long means the distance is growing. But as a bloodsucking monster, Axel just finds it… annoying. It’s an obstacle, that’s all. And of course the part of his brain no longer under his control doesn’t want to find Vanessa in the first place. He knows that before the hospital was overrun people had thought of him as a robotic, heartless bastard, interested in his mission and nothing else. That hadn’t been… entirely true at the time. (Axel had seen it as being “driven” instead.) Ironically, now he’s almost devoid of feeling like they’d said, unable to be happy or upset or afraid. He can be neutral, hungry, and angry. Those are his three modes now.

Callie asks if it’s scary being a vampire. Axel tells her it just kind of pisses him off. He’s going to become human again as soon as he can.

She falls asleep in his arms, and Axel-the-vampire is being beaten back by Axel-the-marine from trying to fucking eat her. He’s unable to care about what happens to Callie, but he knows that when he’s human again, he will. So he cuddles her to his chest and keeps an ear out for ferals who might wander by.

Axel hadn’t slept very well as a human, but now he doesn’t sleep at all. He wonders what he would dream about if he could. Within a year, he’d more or less stopped dreaming about time before the Rising. Within two years, his sleeping habits had gotten so bad that he couldn’t remember his dreams. Now it’s been a little more than three years, and he’s no longer able to dream.

He wonders if he would dream about being trapped in The Farm, or if he’d dream about something from before the Rising like he used to, or if he’d dream about Vanessa, or even something mundane.

Then Axel wonders how long he can last before he forgets what it’s like to be human.

He needs to find Vanessa before that happens.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not really sure how much time passed between Axel escaping and then meeting up with Doc, so I stayed a little vague on purpose.
> 
> Please leave comments/kudos.
> 
> If you enjoyed this work, please feel free to check out my original WIP, [Nucleus](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10027367).


End file.
